There is so much money to be made here. Oh, and there's the human dimension too.
From Delancey Place:
Today's encore selection -- from The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman.
The quest to understand obesity:
"Putting the evidence together, the key point is that excessive weight gain relative to height during childhood is a strong risk factor for future diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. A major reason that overweight children have a propensity to become overweight or obese adults is that they develop and then retain for life more fat cells than average-weight children. Crucially, these extra fat cells are often inside the abdomen, packed around organs such as the liver, kidneys, and intestines.These visceral (belly) fat cells behave differently than fat elsewhere in the body in two important ways. First, they are several times more sensitive to hormones and thus tend to be more metabolically active, which means they are capable of storing and releasing fat more rapidly than fat cells in other parts of the body. Second, when visceral cells release fatty acids (something fat cells do all the time), they dump the molecules almost straight into the liver, where the fat accumulates and eventually impairs the liver's ability to regulate the release of glucose into the blood. An excess of belly fat (a paunch) is therefore a much greater risk factor for metabolic disease than a high BMI.
"Although we still don't understand why some people store fat more readily than others, it is uncontroversial to state that all humans are adept at storing extra energy as fat and that all of us inherited trade-offs in the ways we use energy to grow and reproduce that did not adapt us to thrive in conditions of too much energy. However, if you look at any graph of obesity rates over the last few decades, it is evident that the percentage of overweight people has remained constant while the percentage of obese people started rising rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. What changed?
"The most widespread, partly true, yet overly simplistic explanation for why more people than ever are getting fatter is that more people than ever are eating more and being less active. As chapter 9 described, there is plenty of evidence that food industrialization over the last few decades has increased portion sizes and made food denser in calories. Other industrial 'advances,' such as the proliferation of cars and labor-saving devices, as well as more sitting, cause people to be less active. If you add up how many extra calories people consume and how many fewer they expend, then you get larger energy surpluses, which translate into more fat.
"The 'calories in versus calories out' explanation for the obesity epidemic is not entirely wrong, but the situation is more complicated because we have also changed what we are eating. Remember that energy balance is regulated by hormones, especially insulin. Insulin's chief function is to shuttle energy from the food you have digested into your body's cells. It bears repeating that insulin rises when blood glucose levels rise, causing muscle and fat cells to take up and store some fraction of that sugar as fat. Insulin also causes fat (triglycerides) in the bloodstream to enter fat cells and simultaneously inhibits fat cells from releasing triglycerides back into the bloodstream.
Insulin thus makes you fatter, regardless of whether the fat comes from eating carbohydrates or fat. According to some estimates, twenty-first-century adolescents in the United States secrete far more insulin than their parents produced when they were the same age in 1975. It's no wonder more of them are overweight. Since insulin rises only after you eat foods that contain glucose, one obvious culprit for higher levels of insulin and more fat must be eating more glucose-rich foods, such as soda and cake. There are, however, many other factors that promote obesity, including two additional factors related to sugar. One is the rate at which you break foods down into glucose, which determines how quickly your body produces insulin. The other factor, which is more indirect, is how much fructose you eat, and how fast it hits your liver.
"To explore these effects of sugar on obesity let's compare how your body responds to eating a raw apple that weighs 100 grams (3.5 ounces) and a 56 gram (2 ounce) pack of fruit rolls that once upon a time were apples but then were industrially processed with sugar added for sweetness and any fiber removed (along with the apple's nutrients) to improve the product's shelf life. If we focus only on the sugar, one major difference evident between these two foods is that the apple has about 13 grams (a bit less than half an ounce) of sugar, whereas the fruit rolls have been packed with 21 grams (three quarters of an ounce) of sugar, hence nearly twice the calories.
A second difference is the percentage of sugar types. The apple is about 30 percent glucose: the fruit roll is about 50 percent glucose. So eating the fruit rolls yields about the same amount of fructose and more than twice the glucose. Finally, the apple comes with a skin, and the apple's sugar resides within cells, both of which contain fiber. Fiber, also known as roughage, is the portion of the apple you cannot digest, but it plays a crucial role in how you digest the apple's sugars. Fiber makes up the walls of the cells that encase the sugars in the apple, slowing the rate at which you break down carbohydrates into sugars. Fiber also coats the food and the walls inside your gut, functioning as a barrier to slow the rate at which your intestine transports all those calories, especially the sugar, from your gut to your bloodstream and organs. Finally, fiber speeds the rate at which food passes through your gut, and it makes you feel full. As a result, when we compare the two apple products, the real apple not only supplies less sugar, but it makes you feel more sated and causes you to digest those sugars at a much more gradual rate. In contrast, the fruit rolls are termed high glycemic because they rapidly and markedly elevate blood sugar levels (a condition known as hyperglycemia).
"It is possible to get fat by eating too many apples, but you now have enough information to appreciate why the fruit roll is so much more likely to cause weight gain....
....MUCH MORE
However fructose, in any form, even from fruit, messes with your liver when taken into your body at speed and in volume.
The so-called "high-fructose corn syrup" is high-fructose only in comparison with corn syrup, which is 100% glucose. The HFCS's are usually 50% glucose and 50% fructose, the same proportions as sucrose, table sugar. But it's that 50% fructose that'll get you.
